The Defiant
@DefiantNews
NEW:
Base’s Jesse Pollak
@jessepollak says he got
@base’s biggest bet wrong, and it felt it like a “punch in the face” Key takeaways: • Onchain social “disintegrated” as a growth driver • Base fell behind in perps, prediction markets, tokenization & payments • Base App returns to Coinbase under
@cobie • 2026 priorities: trading, payments & AI agents
@jessepollak says he got
@base’s biggest bet wrong, and it felt it like a “punch in the face” Key takeaways: • Onchain social “disintegrated” as a growth driver • Base fell behind in perps, prediction markets, tokenization & payments • Base App returns to Coinbase under
@cobie • 2026 priorities: trading, payments & AI agents
@jessepollak
trading means every asset. tokenized stocks, memes, app coins, whatever you want to trade. payments means stablecoins that work globally, for people and for enterprises. agents means accelerating all of it because crypto is native money for computers and artificial intelligence is going to create trillions of new economic actors.
and against these three pillars, builders are the backbone. If there’s one thing i’m deeply proud of since the beginning of base, alongside all the mistakes, it’s betting on builders. base is what it is because of the people who built it. not the roadmap, not the infrastructure - the builders who showed up, shipped, and kept going through every version of this, the good stretches and the hard ones. and we're going to keep backing them: Base Layer, Base Batches, the Base Ecosystem Fund, my time, my teams time, coinbase and base app distribution as much as we’re able to. we will do everything we can to make builders win on base. because when builders win, base wins.
if you’ve made it this far and you couldn’t already tell: i don't have everything figured out. we try stuff, we make mistakes, and we adapt in public. the feedback, even the sharp stuff, genuinely makes us better. we see it all, and even when we can't respond to everything, it burrows its way into my brain and makes me better. so thank you.
we are building a global economy that increases innovation, creativity, and freedom. we will do this by doing the right thing, working hard, staying optimistic, pushing boundaries with creativity, and putting the team over the individual. and it’s working: with QoQ growth in dex share and payment volume, and a renewed focus on products that drive sustainable growth.
hopefully we can shut up about content coins now. i was wrong and i’m sorry! (although if someone else builds content coins and they work then i’m going to lose it. and I'm also not going to just let $jesse fade away - when I launch something, I'm in it for the long term)
ok thats enough typing, back to work